I was born in the year of 1815. That was a hard year. In the summer they had a battle called Waterloo and all the village’s men fought in it, far away. There weren’t many left in Montfermeil to cut the hay or bale it, to wring the necks of chickens or shoe horses or chop wood.

“I was walking,” Maman told me. “Then I felt you coming. The grass was waist-high so I just squatted down in it …”

That was my arrival. While Papa was fighting in a muddy field, my mother was cursing. She pushed me out into thistles and hay.

“You were a girl—so of course I kept you,” she said.

She never liked boys.

*  *  *

After the battle, Papa came back. Many men didn’t return but he did. He didn’t have a scratch on him and he clinked with coins that he’d stolen from the pockets of dying men. Once, he told me about it: picking his teeth, he said, “I pretended I was helping them but I wasn’t! Ha! I was taking their pennies and silver crosses … Well, the dead don’t need money, do they?”

That was my father. Luc Thenardier. Thin with a graying, bristled chin. His eyes were quick like a rat’s—quick and cunning and black. He smoked a pipe. It yellowed the ends of his fingers and left a dent in his lip.

The Battle of Waterloo made him rich. With dead men’s money he bought himself a new hat and a pocket watch. For Maman he bought a cape edged with fur. I’m not sure what he thought of me, his new baby daughter—but I know what he thought of the empty inn in Montfermeil. It sat at the end of the ruelle du Boulanger. Maman told me how they walked there one summer’s evening, arm in arm, to look at it. It was damp and crooked. Its windows were greenish with moss; birds and spiders nested in its eaves.

Papa rubbed his chin and said, “Why don’t we buy it, ma chère?”

She scowled. “Buy it? Why? It’s falling down!”

“It is. But there aren’t any other inns for miles and miles! People would come! And there’s money to be made from drunken men …”

So they picked the moss from its glass with their fingernails and swept the bigger spiders out into the yard.

My father called the inn the Sergeant of Waterloo. “Named,” he told his customers, “after myself, and my own brave role in the battle …” Papa told lies all the time and Maman would listen to them, polishing glasses and admiring him—this man who’d plucked buttons from dying soldiers’ coats and then left those men to die in the rain.

My parents.

This inn was my home. I was born in a bright hayfield but I grew up in a dark, stone tavern with nettles by its door. Its sign creaked back and forth. Mice scurried behind my bedroom wall at night.

*  *  *

I think I remember my sister being born; it was October when the leaves were crispy brown. But my first proper memory came when I was three. It’s clear and real, like cupped water.

It begins with water too—weeks and weeks of it.